This is something that we go over extensively inside at the loading portion of a Pure PROgramming. But I think that it’s a really simple and effective conversation to have for trainees who are just following a program as well as a topic to revisit if you are a coach. It’s very easy to get married to one approach and forget that these other options exist. And that one of these might make sense for one of your clients or even one portion of a program; where another loading method might work better for another portion of the same lift that you are prescribing or that you are doing yourself. So maybe for the main lift percentages makes sense, and then for most of the accessory work reps in reserve makes the most sense. Things like experience come in to play, and training age.

So today we are going to dive into all of that. We will go over reps and reserve, rate of perceived exertion, Amrap‘s, percentages, and the rule of two. All of these are simply methods that we can use to prescribe a load or how much weight someone is lifting for a given exercise. That’s all these are.

My hope would be that you have a pretty good idea of which one to use when when you’re either choosing load for yourself or a client.

RPE and RIR

I actually became a familiarized with rate of perceived exertion, or RPE through conditioning, versus weightlifting. But it can be applied to nearly any type of exercise where intensity is a factor.

There are two different versions one where it is a scale of 1 to 20, and a more commonly used adaptive version which is a 1 to 10 scale. One being no effort at all, and 10 being maximal effort. Generally speaking in training where we are pushing our muscles and attempting to elicit strength or growth, the RPE is going to be above seven. It’s going to be a challenging load.

No another loading method is kind of the yang to the yang of our PE. And that is RIR, or reps in reserve.

I definitely came to know this in my college lifting days. But we referred to it as “go until you have one to two reps left in the tank.”

From a programming standpoint, you might give a range of reps that you want them to hit, like 8 to 12 reps, or 6 to 8 reps. With a weight that is a two reps in reserve. So if they hit eight reps and they feel like they could do three more, the weight needed to be heavier if that makes sense.

It’s literally just working on fatigue, you might just say perform reps until one to two RIR. I might use this on an exercise like push-ups, or strict dips, or pull ups. some thing where I know the number of reps they’re going to be able to perform is within the range that I want them to be hitting. For instance I would never just say one rep in reserve for bodyweight walking lunges for my clientele. They would be doing walking lunges for 30 minutes. Which likely does not fit their goals or the goals of my programming. And that’s why it’s so important to know the goal of your programming or a given exercise prescription, because we want to choose the best loading method for that.

You can think of reps in reserve as the opposite of RPE. So, 10 RP would be zero reps in reserve, 9RPE would be one rep in reserve, so on and so forth. Now inside a Pure PROgramming I have these charts all lined up next to one another, and I prefer ranges then definite numbers. That’s just because how many reps somebody has left in the tank is going to depend day today at a given load. That’s why the next method is not always my favorite. And that will be percentages.

A nice little transition is to talk about training age when choosing between rate of perceived exertion, and percentages. You could argue either way,